March 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
I was perusing the Presidential candidates websites today. Interestingly, they all look roughly the same, though Barack Obama's site is better designed than the others in my humble opinion. What was even more interesting was the OS choices, though perhaps these should come as no surprise:
| John McCain: | Windows Server 2003 |
| Barack Obama: | Linux (with a touch of FreeBSD) |
| Hillary Clinton: | Unknown |
Source: Netcraft.com
Posted by Paul Venezia on March 19, 2008 12:18 AM
February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
It seems that Nick Farrell over at The Inquirer isn't so thrilled by my MacBook Air review. Actually, he doesn't really mention the review, opting instead to summarize the sidebar with additional commentary. To clarify a few of his points:
o- Yep, it took five hours to do the whole migration. The first 30 minutes were problematic, but the rest of the time was the two systems transferring 50GB of files via 100Mbit Ethernet without supervision.
o- The Air didn't crash -- the Migration Assistant application crashed.
o- I bought the Air myself.
o- "Fanboy" seems to be a favorite expression of someone who doesn't like to see positive comments about something they don't like. I gave the Air a "Very Good" rating, and it earned it. If it had integrated 3G and a realistic 5 hours of battery life, it might have made it to "Excellent".
o- Isn't it odd that although I'm apparently a "hack" trying to put positive spin on Apple's products, I decided to write an entire sidebar about a negative experience?
I suggest that Nick read the whole review as well as my blog comments. I'd be delighted to see him run that though his fun-house mirror.
UPDATE: Interesting. All the comments on the Inquirer post just disappeared right after I submitted one.
UPDATE: They're back, sans my comment. Curious.
Yet another UPDATE: I might suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the actual review, and my companion blog post, not just the sidebar. I wouldn't want anyone to be embarrassingly misinformed -- it's bad for the knees.
Posted by Paul Venezia on February 12, 2008 11:22 AM
February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The MacBook Air finds its Nietzsche
Quite often, less really is more. One staple of computing in general is the perceived need for options. Painting yourself into a corner a lack of options with hardware or software is never a good thing, but there's a difference between that and trying to paint the room with a half-ton paintbrush.
It's no secret that Steve Jobs -- and by extension, Apple -- is very interested in pushing the design envelope. Going back a long way, except perhaps the dark years in the nineties, Apple has had a history of making big changes and taking big chances with their hardware. The Mac was really the first home computer to have integrated SCSI and a mouse. Apple computers were among the first to be produced without internal floppy drives. The Apple Newton was one of the first usable PDAs and even today enjoys a startling number of users. NeXT Computer, founded by Steve Jobs in 1985, is looked on as being way too far ahead of its' time, producing a line of UNIX-based workstations running the NextSTEP OS, an OS that is the precursor to Apple's OS X. Apple's OS X itself is a complete and total departure from Mac OS -- a move that helped reinvent Apple. The iPod, of course, was instrumental in building a whole new industry. There are more examples, some flops, some not, but they have a common theme: out with the old, in with the new, whether you're ready for it or not.
Apple's design theory seems to be "Rounded rectangles, white or silver, as few seams and ports as possible, as few cables as possible". If Apple designed a Swiss Army knife, it would look like an egg. Their products certainly are attractive, with clean lines and an overall minimalist approach. To get those clean lines, however, all those bulky ports and slots have to go. Quite honestly, I think Steve Jobs harbors a deep, personal resentment towards D-Sub connectors. That's the concept behind the MacBook Air.
In an age when you can still get a laptop with a parallel port, Apple has created a laptop with no legacy ports, even deleting FireWire from the specs. There's also no built-in optical drive. Many reacted to this with disdain, decrying the lack of an internal optical drive, fixed RAM, and limited ports as being too limited and artificially handicapping the system. I've come to realize that I don't think that's the case at all. When I thought about it, I don't really need any of those things on a daily basis, and when I do, it's rare. Perhaps desktops need lots of ports, but not laptops -- not any more. In a time when I can buy a 16GB USB2 flash drive for under $80, why would I bother to carry DVDs and CDs? If I don't use those, why do I need the drive? If I need to transfer files between systems, I can use wired or wireless Ethernet, or that USB flash drive.
I get the vast majority of my computer-based entertainment via the Internet. Music and movies, and other forms of entertainment are easy to download from iTunes, Amazon, or anywhere. Though there are subscription services like NetFlix that are PC-only, that will likely change sooner rather than later. Occasionally, I'll buy a DVD, or a CD at a vintage store, and encoding those to MP3 and MP4 is trivial using a desktop system. I then get the benefit of being able to play them anywhere, instantly. I simply get more bang for my buck with digital files, and there's no reason I'll ever go back to physical media.
I also get the vast majority of my applications from the Internet. I can't ever recall loading a CD or DVD into a Mac to install software other than an OS installation. Even when devices come with driver disks on CD, I generally download them from the manufacturer's website since the version will be newer and hopefully better. The first disc I've put into my MacBook Pro in probably six months was the Apple disc that contained the MacBook Air's CD/DVD sharing installer. I won't miss it on the Air. With Bluetooth, I won't really need more than one USB port either. If I do, there are 3" x 1" four-port USB hubs on the market for less than $15.
So as I use the Air and think on this, I gaze around my lab, noting all the random cables, connectors, components, and options. There are several PC laptops around, rife with colored ports, switches, slots, and buttons. It's a stark contrast to the lithe little laptop in front of me. It's the antithesis, and I think that's a good thing. 
Posted by Paul Venezia on February 10, 2008 08:43 PM
February 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Once in awhile, I reflect on some of the tools that I use constantly, and the fact that there's an awful lot of unsung heros out there. Last night I started thinking about it and compiling a simple list of tools and some specific people that fit this bill. Here they are, in no particular order.
PHP
This one should be obvious. PHP has developed into an extremely strong, functional, stable, and fast Web development framework. If Perl makes easy things hard and hard things possible, PHP makes everything easy. I've even taken to writing backend scripts in PHP that would have been Perl not too long ago. A recent IMAP mailbox scanning, parsing, and spam blocking database interaction script springs to mind. It's around 30 lines of PHP and works like a charm.
MySQL
Again, another obvious entry here. Where would we be without MySQL? It's far more powerful and flexible than many DBAs will admit, and scales extremely well. Think Wikipedia.
phpMyAdmin
I don't know how many times I've used phpMyAdmin, or on how many servers I've installed it, but it's simply a phenomenal tool for working with MySQL.
Linux
'nuff said.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD (and NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc) are the unsung heros of the unsung heros. I operate several high-powered and heavily-loaded FreeBSD boxes, and it's a welcome change from the cult of Linux on occasion. It might not be as admin-friendly to the uninitiated, but once you grok it, there are features in FreeBSD that you wish your Linux boxes had.
DarwinPorts
For the past 7 years or so, I've been using Mac OS X, and never have I used the Fink package system. It just seemed, well, not quite right to me. Enter DarwinPorts. I use this all the time, and find it fast, flexible, and simple.
Larry Wall
I want to live on whatever planet Larry's from. It's hard to picture the world without Perl... and we wouldn't have Perl without Larry, that's for sure.
OpenSSL/OpenSSH
The deployed base of OpenSSL and OpenSSH is probably incalculable. From my cellphone to my TiVo, to my workstations, laptops, servers, across all operating systems and devices, there's OpenSSL and probably OpenSSH. It's become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.
Bram Moolenaar and Vim
Another hidden hero, Bram Moolenaar (et al) is responsible for the best editor ever -- Vim. It's my mail reader on some boxes, obviously my editor of choice, and my IDE all rolled into one. I've been using Vim for years and years, and probably still only know and use 20% of the functions. I'm constantly using Vim reflexes in other editors (like Microsoft Word, or in ecto, which I'm using to write this post). If I can find Vim keybindings for an app, I'll use them. Firefox already supports several, such as the / search.
There are many, many more than those listed here, but these are the ones that topped my list last night while I reflected on this post, a few fingers of Lagavulin warming by belly and my brain. Have some more? Drop me a line.
Posted by Paul Venezia on February 8, 2008 12:57 PM
January 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Why must this be so difficult, so painful? Why must you spurn me at every opportunity, causing me to rend my clothing and speak in tongues? This hold you have over me is distressing... O Verizon, how I loathe thee.
You tempt me with promises of on-line account management, of security, let leave me hanging with Byzantine confirmation methods and completely unintelligible voice recordings of temporary PIN numbers. You email me validation codes that don't work, serve me ASP.NET pages that look and function like it's 1998, and yet STILL, you won't let me check my bill on-line.
Why must it be so? Why must you insist that you call my home phone with a temporary PIN thats read in a sampled voice? A voice that makes the letters D,E,G,P,V, and Z all sound alike? How many possible combinations must I try before I'm granted access to my own account, an account that I had full access to only weeks ago? It seems like so long -- so long since I found your website even moderately useful. No, I fear that the deeper feeling is gone, edged away from true apathy by a breathtaking barrage of useless and completely non-functional verification steps. It didn't have to be this way. You could have shown even an inkling of competence -- I would have forgiven, I would have tolerated you for a little while longer...
Now, I know not what will become of me. Perhaps I will finally convert all my lines to Time Warner Digital Phone. But wait! I cannot! You have me in an impossible position because I have DSL!
O Verizon... why can't I quit you?
Posted by Paul Venezia on January 30, 2008 12:27 PM
January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
To preface, my home and lab phone systems are driven by Asterisk -- technically an aging TrixBox installation running under VMware ESX 3. It runs two SIP trunks and two analog lines, handles all voicemail, routes calls through the cheapest service for any given destination, and even irons my shirts.
I've found a new way that it can brighten my life, however. I live in New Hampshire. That means that early January in an election year becomes a whirlwind of phonecalls, doorbells, and half a dozen poster-sized glossy mailers in the mailbox every day, hawking all the candidates you've ever heard of, and those you've never heard of. Today's primary will cause this nonsense to throttle down somewhat, but the past week has been really rough. My Asterisk system has logged roughly 20 phone calls per day from all the candidates. Fortunately, only a few of those actually made the phones ring -- the rest were shunted directly to a recording I made where I thanked the caller to never, ever call back, and that while I support the democratic process, I've chosen not to accept any phone calls from any candidates. It's proven exceptionally useful, especially when looking through the logs. It's not perfect, however, since I have to get a call from a number before I can match on that to shunt the call, but that means that all the calls from 000-000-0000 go unnoticed, as do the staggering number of calls from JOHN EDWARDS FOR AMERICA. I didn't vote for him.
Score one for the geek, I guess. In the next few weeks, I'll be transitioning my Asterisk installation to TrixBox Pro for a test -- no more VM, it'll run on real hardware, and use real FXO/FXS linecards rather than the Sipura/LinkSys ATAs I'm using now. Hopefully it'll be a simple process, since at this point, I don't think I can do without it. It's just too darn useful.
Posted by Paul Venezia on January 8, 2008 07:18 PM
November 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Having endured the Vongo ads during various football games the past few days, I figured I'd at least check it out. I wasn't sure what to expect, and boy was I surprised. If you don't already know, Vongo is a new digital movie distribution site that allows users to download as many movies as they want for $9.99 a month. Intriguing, for sure, but riddled with artificial restrictions, apparently.
For one thing, Vongo is deeply, deeply Microsoft-centric. So deeply, in fact, that you can't even view their website with a browser claiming to come from another OS. With a Linux or Mac browser, the only possible option is to enter your email address to be notified if/when your OS is supported.
This means that you can't do any research on Vongo from anything but a Windows box -- Switching FireFox to identify itself as IE on Windows XP completely broke the site rendering, and hitting the site from my Nokia N95 (as I would imagine lots of people will do when seeing the ads on football games in bars or at a friend's house) gave me the nice "Incompatible OS" page as well, preventing me from getting any more information about Vongo. Handy.
Also, if you enter in 'vongo.com' to go directly to the site, it redirects to 'www.vongo.com.', a typo that thankfully most browsers ignore, but does show a certain lack of attention to detail.
So I wandered around the site with my Windows XP VM, looking for some answers to what's really happening on the back end. It seems that the only compatible playback devices are Windows XP, 2000, and Vista, or an Xbox 360. I could find no mention of playback on portable devices, although the commercials made a point of referencing this ability (and a point of not mentioning/showing an iPod). I'd guess that the Zune is supported, but I've seen no specific information on that issue.
But the fact that they were expecting to support portable devices without specifically mentioning the Zune gave me a flicker of hope that these movies might not be horrendously crippled for playback on other devices, like my iPod, Nokia N95, and Mac. Those hopes were dashed when I read this on their site:
"In order to enjoy the full experience of Vongo and Media Center Edition feature integration with Windows Vista, we strongly recommend that you uninstall the Vongo application software prior to upgrading to Vista. (Please Note: When you uninstall Vongo you will lose movies and videos already downloaded to your library. Because Windows 2000 and XP are separate and distinct operating systems from Vista, there is simply no technical means of porting Vongo videos across operating systems. As a Vongo subscriber you can always replace the videos in your library at no charge.)"
Really? The movies you download on XP won't be playable on Vista due to technical reasons? Please. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. This little lie is probably in place just to convince potential users to upgrade to Vista first, with Vongo as the proverbial carrot.
So it seems to me that Vongo has been designed as a Vista delivery catalyst and little more...and why would I want to artificially restrict myself so heavily, to the point where upgrading to another Microsoft OS will cause me to lose the movies I've already downloaded?
Amazon recently started offering $8.99 non-DRM MP3 albums. I've bought several so far, since I can use them on any of my playback devices, from my Sonos system to my Linux workstations and laptops to my iPod. It's this reason that I don't use the iTunes store, or any other crippled delivery system. So sorry, Vongo, but I'm completely uninterested.
Posted by Paul Venezia on November 25, 2007 11:09 AM
October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The land of fruits and nuts goes quiet
Matt Prigge sent me a link to this article on the sudden revocation of the ca.gov domain on Tuesday, and the chaos that ensued. I'm hoping that there's far more to this story than simply that the GSA just decided to pull the whole domain. Even if some systems were hacked, that's certainly not cause to pull such a massive zone. You would think that the persons responsible for actually performing the work might have had some clue as to what what happening and mentioned that it might be a big mistake. Or maybe it's such an automated process that anyone with proper credentials can pull zones. If that's the case, then I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
Posted by Paul Venezia on October 5, 2007 09:37 AM
May 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Yesterday, I posted about six things that need to change. One of them was entitled "Broadband Bandits", where I basically denounced broadband companies' artificially limited bandwidth options. After re-reading it, I think I need to clarify a few things.
Certainly, these companies aren't in this business for wholly altruistic purposes -- they're in it to make money. That's the whole idea. The problem that I have with most broadband offerings is that they're specifically designed to limit end-user options without any reasonable alternative. Most areas with broadband access have one or two options, and they're generally both playing this game.
One of the major issues is the ridiculously limited upstream bandwidth provided in most residential packages. For $50 a month, I would expect to get better than 39KB/s uploading images to Flickr, videos to YouTube, pictures to my eBay auctions, and when sending email attachments. Unfortunately this is rarely the case, since upstream bandwidth has been squeezed as low as possible.
Even RoadRunner, a company that does not generally limit users' bandwidth, nor block well-known ports, delivers 5Mb/384k service with their standard package. I tested a freshly-installed RoadRunner line the other day, and found that it's just barely possible to get 5Mb down, with the 384k upstream completely maxed out with TCP ACKs. Other companies do the same thing, offering a 15:1 up/down ratio service that can just barely reach those levels, hampered by the upstream caps.
The DOCSIS cable standard isn't synchronous. Current DOCSIS installations based on the 2.0 standard are capable of delivering 38Mbit/s downstream and 27Mb/s upstream to a group of modems. A small neighborhood would have this bandwidth split between any number of modems, and using the law of averages, most users will get their rated download speeds. But notice that the 2.0 standard's down/up ratio is roughly 5:3. This doesn't coincide with the 15:1 ratio found in most broadband plans. Some offerings in the US and Canada are nearly 20:1. This doesn't jive with the capabilities of DOCSIS, so there's no technical reason why these plans exist. Upstream data is subjected to higher noise levels across a cable plant, but that doesn't justify the low caps found nearly everywhere.
The new DOCSIS 3.0 standard is very new and hasn't been widely adopted yet, but was designed to give FIOS a run for its money, offering 160Mb/s downstream and 120Mbit/s upstream to the same number of modems. Again, we see a similar down/up ratio in play.
I've seen many commercials for broadband service showing a fellow sitting in his kitchen with a laptop, telling his wife he can't go to the mall because he has to finish some work. Suddenly, we see a screenshot showing a "Done" dialog box, and voila, due to the power of XYZ's broadband service, the lucky fellow can go to the mall and relax on the hard wooden benches outside Bed Bath and Beyond. The problem here is that the ad specifically targets those people that can telecommute, without mentioning that if he was uploading a PowerPoint presentation, he'd be sitting there for a long, long time... assuming that the provider hasn't blocked IPSec and he can actually connect to the corporate network in the first place.
Consumer broadband needs to change. It needs to provide at least a 5:3 down/up ratio as part of the standard package for a reasonable price. I know dozens of broadband users that would gladly trade a few Mb downstream for a few Mb upstream, and this trend is only going to grow. Fears of illicit filesharing and copyright infringement be damned -- you can't penalize a captive audience for something they might do.
Posted by Paul Venezia on May 10, 2007 11:42 AM
May 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Six things that need to change
Although I'm generally able to see both sides of an argument, there exists a short list of issues that I just can't comprehend. These are those issues.
1) The RIAA's war on its customers
This one has been going on so long as to almost be accepted. Of course, that's their plan. The vast amount of money being poured into lawyers, lobbyists, and scare tactics by the RIAA would have been more than enough to rework their long-deceased business model into something for the next generation. For an industry that was built upon pushing the envelope, they certainly can't seem to think outside the CD case. The heavy lobbying in Florida that has resulted in the used CD market there receiving stricter controls than the gun market is just one tiny example.
The RIAA is certainly under attack from every angle -- piracy, slowing CD sales, a massive increase in self-produced music, and flagging interest in marquee acts -- but nearly all of that is their own fault. Instead of embracing the new market, they've been trying to kill it by shipping CDs with rootkits masquerading as DRM schemes, producing lawsuits by the bushel, apparently destroying Internet radio, and projecting an overall public persona that falls somewhere between Al Capone and Stalin. It's just ludicrous.
But then, this is the industry best described in a misquote to Hunter S Thompson: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." His original words were actually describing TV broadcasting, but the sentiment prevails.
2) Broadband Bandits (Update: More on this topic can be found here)
Comcast is the easy target on this one, but there are many perpetrators of this travesty. You know who you are. More importantly, your customers know who you are, and will jump ship in an instant if given the chance. With most of the competition buried in the backyard, and a weakened FCC sitting idly by, Comcast, Verizon, and many other providers are ramping up prices and dropping service levels. They're also applying voodoo AUP interpretations to cut off paying customers that go over some amorphous limit. Many of these companies come from a delivery-only background, where they deliver the signal, and the customer passively accepts it, such as cable TV. Back in the day, this was largely true of the Internet -- Web servers existed in datacenters, ISPs, and universities, and most content was text and the occasional picture. With Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and the advent of simple videoconferencing, end users are much more apt to be sending nearly as much as they receive, yet most broadband connections are still ridiculously asynchronous. I just ordered Verizon DSL to provide a backup circuit. $30/mo for a 3Mb/768k circuit. This means that uploading a few 5 megapixel photos will take me roughly 3 minutes, and completely obliterate that 3Mb/s download rate due to upstream congestion, even though I'm not downloading anything.
There are a few reasons that most of these wildly unbalanced plans exist. Contracts with peering partners generally dictate up/down ratios to be maintained (eg, saving the ISP money). They also prevent customers from using videoconferencing and VoIP technologies to their full potential, resulting in poor performance. This forces the customer to only use approved methods of communication (eg, paying the carrier more per month). And lastly, they've always been that way, right?
As a sideline to all this nonsense, many carriers go so far as to block well known ports, such as Web, IPSec, and SMTP ports to residential lines. True, most people aren't running Web servers from their house, but lots of them are just trying to connect to the corporate VPN. To do that, you need a business-level contract for way more money per month and usually lower bandwidth. What a bargain.
Certainly, not all carriers act this way. Comcast and Verizon DSL are famous for it, but Time Warner's RoadRunner seems to be above this chicanery, at least so far. If AT&T wasn't dismantled nearly 25 years ago, we'd still be renting our phones from Ma Bell for $20 a month, and our telecommunications infrastructure would be the best the third-world had to offer. At least Verizon is offering FIOS in some areas, yet I know of entire communities that have no broadband whatsoever. Wasn't there a Universal Service initiative started over a decade ago? Note as you read that page, you see "The Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service recommended that the Federal Communications Commission take immediate action to rein in explosive growth in high-cost universal service support disbursements. The Joint Board is also seeking comment on proposals for long-term, comprehensive reform of the high-cost program. 5/1/07." This is because we've gotten nothing for a whole lot of something.
Just ask a South Korean how much they spend on the 100Mbit Internet circuit in their house. CNet was talking about 20Mbit links, universal video-on-demand on the cheap back in 2004. Not much has changed in three years, except their average bandwidth has increased fivefold. Heck, just ask them about the Internet service to their mobile phones -- it beats anything in the US by far. This brings me to number three.
3) The US is a mobile communications wasteland
Crazy, indecipherable "plans", "anytime minutes", $0.10 per text message, $0.003 per KB (read that any way you want), and current phones that were cutting edge in Europe when John Paul II was still wandering around the Vatican. That's the state of mobile connectivity in the US today. I've heard more than a few foreigners describe a trip to a T-Mobile store as "like visiting a cellphone museum". Given what they're used to in Europe and Asia, I have little doubt this is true. Wireless carriers in the US have been raking in money hand over fist for the past five years, riding the cellphone boom as high as it will go. During all this, they've been slowly doling out features to their users like cake to the starving, while the rest of the world runs circles around us.
The pending release of Apple's iPhone may spark something here, just as the iPod blew the portable MP3 player market apart. Hey, has Steve Jobs ever made a mistake?
4) Airport Wifi
This one's personal. I understand that fleecing business travelers for $10 or so during a flight delay is part of the business model, but even crack dealers give away the first few tastes. Can't we get 30 minutes free, and a reasonable hourly rate thereafter? I can't believe that any airport Wifi installation hasn't already paid for itself a hundred times over. I'll continue to hold Manchester Airport up as a shining example -- wide coverage, free service, no splash page. It's just beautiful.
5) Spam and the Windows Protection Racket
This one will never disappear, but it can be marginalized. If thousands and thousands of compromised Windows systems were to be patched, replaced, or burned in effigy, the volume of spam worldwide would be drastically reduced. Couple this to viruses, adware, malware, and so on, and there's very little that your PC can't do -- your taxes, spreadsheets, Web surfing, and spamming the bejeezus out of thousands of people. I think we may be near the top of a Bell curve on that one. Vista is more secure than XP (which isn't saying much) but the sheer numbers of wide-open Windows systems on the Internet will necessarily begin to decline due to hardware failure, if nothing else. If the replacements are tougher to compromise, then the spam levels will abate somewhat, as will other nefarious afflictions of the digital age, and we'll all be a little safer and saner.
Of course, if Windows were suddenly secure, it would directly affect the revenue of hundreds of smaller software vendors hawking Windows protection applications, but I can't feel too bad for Symantec or McAfee -- they'll survive.
6) Oops! I lost your ID. My bad.
Every week or so, we hear about the theft of another million identities from a laptop or network intrusion. Sometimes it's a corporation, sometimes a university, or sometimes the federal government. Sometimes it's your ID, sometimes it's mine. Pretty soon, it'll be nearly everyone that's ever had a credit card, applied for a loan, opened a bank account, or was simply assigned a social security number.
There are no formal penalties for this invasive personal intrusion, and some companies simply don't tell anyone that the event occurred. If a company doesn't have adequate security and lets a few hundred thousand database records flap in the wind, the victim will at best spend days straightening out a credit mess and changing all their accounts to new numbers. At worst, they'll lose money, their credit rating, and maybe even their job through no fault of their own. If a department store chains' physical security was so lax as to have their customers violently mugged en masse simply for being in one of their stores, you can bet they wouldn't be in business any more. What would be worse would be the poor people that got mugged because they were in a different store, but that store told the muggers they were there. Identity theft isn't much different -- since your ID is bought and sold to whomever, without your approval.
We need accountability for data security lapses of this magnitude, plain and simple. We only get one identity, and when it has been dragged through the mud it can take years to recover, and sometimes it's impossible. Unfortunately, it will take new laws and stiff penalties to see any change here, since it's apparently more cost effective to throw your customers under the bus (see number one, above).
It's obvious that the US is going through a period of massive change, largely related to the presence of the Internet and the forces that can exert some influence on it. Some of these issues may be just growing pains, but some of them may be cancer. Thus, it's very important that we not shortchange our technological future for short-term economic and bureaucratic issues. We've sold our society to the electron, and we'll be beholden to anyone who wields it better than we do.
Posted by Paul Venezia on May 9, 2007 02:58 PM
September 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
See? It's what plenty of folks have been saying all along... at least when it comes to entertainment, the viewer does actually know what they want.
I just downloaded the entire first season of The State, the hysterical sketch comedy show that originally aired on MTV in the early nineties. Browsing through the iTunes TV Show listings, I almost swallowed my teeth when I saw the show offered, and immediately spent the $10 to download the first season. I just finished watching the first three episodes from my iPod plugged into my TV.
Just as the networks have discovered that canceled shows have another life as DVD compilations, they're starting to see the market for these shows on iTunes. Big surprise. What they're still missing is that canceling these shows in the first place is a bad idea (see Arrested Development).
It's stunning to me that perusing the offerings in the iTunes store will show current television shows side-by-side with a 12-year-old series. When The State was originally broadcast, the Internet was still the playground of academia, and a 33.6 modem link was the only way to connect from anywhere else. Of course, Beavis and Butthead is also available now as well. The difference is that The State hasn't been broadcast in any form whatsoever in at least a decade.
According to MTV, offering this show on iTunes is a way to test the market for older material. My prediction is that you'll suddenly see much more older content up on iTunes. This doesn't necessarily mean it's any good, but the costs of offering it in this format are nearly nothing -- no DVDs to press, no cases to manufacture -- simply a one-time remastering of the material. What a shocking idea.
The only thing that can move this market is money. Suing their own customers hasn't gotten the RIAA and MPAA anywhere, but maybe they're starting to come around now. Too bad that they've already blown it. Just as professional-quality home studios are a reality, high-quality small budget film productions are a reality (see Primer), and the distribution methods are becoming just as cheap as well. If we continue to see painfully bad major-label movies, television shows, and music pushed down our throats, the consumer will go elsewhere -- no matter where that might be. Based on the popularity of videoblogging, if Apple were to start offering a platform for paid distribution of independent television shows and movies, priced far below the cost of buying the Hollywood offerings, I bet they'd create a whole new market.
On the music side of things though, I will not buy music from iTunes. If I can't play it on the format I want, it's worth nothing to me. My Sonos system can't play iTunes files, and that's what runs all the music in the house. Immediate hard stop. Since there are very few competing video devices on the market today, the video side is different, for now. Then again, the iTV is ready for takeoff, and you can bet I'll be on that flight.
Posted by Paul Venezia on September 30, 2006 10:05 AM
May 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
If you have a MacBook or PowerBook with the embedded motion sensor, you have to see Erling Ellingsen's SmackBook. Desktop paging with a tap of the hand; so very cool. I normally see things like this and appreciate the inventive nature of the author, but rarely do I bother to actually implement them. This was an exception.
If you read the comments you'll find patched binaries of Desktop Manager (a great app that I've been using for eons) and some hints on getting everything working. In my case, I'm running 1.67Ghz 15" PowerBook G4 and I had to do some fiddling with the thresholds after building the patched Desktop Pager. I'm still working on getting the settings just right, but if you're having trouble, try this modified smack.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $stable;
open F,"./AMSTracker -s -u0.01 |";
while(
my @a = /(-?\d+)/g;
print, next if @a != 3;
# we get a signed short written as two unsigned bytes
my $x = $a[0];
if(abs($x) < 10) {
$stable++;
}
if(abs($x) > 15 && $stable > 15) {
$stable = 0;
my $foo = $x < 0 ? 'Prev' : 'Next';
system "./notify SwitchTo${foo}Workspace\n";
}
}
It's a bit trying to find the line between breaking your screen hinges to shift desktops and having them switch too easily. The easiest way to gauge what's happening is to run AMSTracker -s -u0.01 > test and tap each side of the screen at an appropriate level, then take a look at the resulting values. Nice work, Erling!
Posted by Paul Venezia on May 25, 2006 03:52 PM
August 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
It's been quite awhile since I upgraded the 12" PowerBook to OS X 10.4.2, and I've fallen in love with plenty of the spiffy new utilities -- I'm continuously hitting F12 on my Linux boxes trying to summon the Dashboard -- but I'm really not that thrilled with a few things.
Bluetooth
The Bluetooth support in 10.4.2 is somewhat spotty, to say the least. I've trained a few mice and a Jabra BT250v headset so far. The mice seem fine, but the headset has given me a bit of a headache. First, after training the headset reconnecting to the Mac wasn't happening. I resolved that by killing the .plist and rebooting. Since then, however I've had the BT applet lock solid on me a few times, requiring me to drop to root and kill -HUP `ps ax | grep blued | grep -v grep | awk '{print$1}'` or worse.
Apple Mail
I was really keen on the new Mail interface. It's slick -- but it doesn't work as well as the Panther version, at least not for me. I've heard much the converse from other folks who apparently had the same problems on the previous version that I'm having with the new version: constant "disconnects" from a local mailserver, slow message loading, duplicate entries in the mailbox list, and no unread count in the INBOX at the left. I run a Cyrus IMAP mailserver handling about 1.6GB of mail in a dozen mailboxes. The server isn't the problem since other MUAs don't exhibit this behavior. It's annoying, but not as obtrusively as
X11
X11 on OS X is a great thing. I prefer running rxvt over terminal.app any day, and exporting remote applications is a constant event. Unfortunately, in Tiger, Apple-Tab to X11 switches to the application, but doesn't bring the windows (or at least the last used window) to the foreground -- they're still buried. This requires me to Apple-~ through all the windows to find the window I was just working in. Needless to say, writing PHP code and testing on FireFox is very frustrating. Just switching between the two applications can take 20 seconds and a dozen keystrokes. In Panther this was a non-issue; now, it's huge. ASM provides a workaround, but I really don't want to have to buy software just to get this functionality back.
Apple: If you don't fix anything else, please fix the X11 bug. If this goes on much longer I'll have to send you my therapy bill. You can appease me in the meantime by sending me a Mighty Mouse. I can't find one anywhere.
Posted by Paul Venezia on August 23, 2005 02:30 AM
January 22, 2004 | Comments: (0)
So it's been awhile since the last post. That was all the way back in 2003, after all.
So what to write about?
Well, you'll have to wait a bit for that last one, but trust me, it's worth it. As for the others, they're left as an exercise for the reader. I'm all outta time.
Posted by Paul Venezia on January 22, 2004 01:20 AM
August 04, 2003 | Comments: (0)
Wow. I must admit that I didn't see this coming at all. Novell buys Ximian? As I mentioned awhile ago, Novell's definitely been moving up the ladder since they've embraced Open Source, but this was wholly unexpected for a number of reasons. First, I never thought that Nat and Miguel would sell, but that might mean that Novell is Doing It Right and won't mess with a good thing, but will simply be providing a source of funding for the truly innovative and successful Ximian.
It looks like Novell won't simply swallow Ximian, but will take the company as a whole entity and spin it as a business unit, dubbed Novell Ximian Services. Interesting.
Could this be a desktop push from Novell, or was this to get their hands on Mono? Probably both, but the initial leaning will probably be on Mono. The most important thing that Novell bought was some stellar Linux experience and coders. If only some other companies would get the clue as Novell seems to have done.
Could we be looking at a full desktop and server Linux distribution from Novell in the near future? Definitely interesting.
Posted by Paul Venezia on August 4, 2003 03:47 PM
May 06, 2003 | Comments: (0)
Caught an article on Microsoft and HP's new "Athens" PC. There are precious few details in the article, but the idea seems to be a mix of Windows, Mac OS X, and the XBox in a corporate PC. It's supposed to be another one of those paradigm shift thingies.
Granted, the PC industry needs a bit of a boost, but then so does the whole economy. Historically, the development of a completely new PC architecture has been the computing equivalent of New Coke, although we've finally managed to lose ISA slots on newer consumer-grade mainboards. Innovation is a Good Thing(tm), and efforts like this need to happen, but I will remain skeptical.
The only thing that resonates with me from this initiative is the built-in thumbprint scanner. Biometrics aren't new; they have never really caught on as a viable consumer or corporate identity management solution. Who wants to deal with USB dongles or wierd mice? It needs to be embedded into the keyboard or the monitor to be effective, and it cannot significantly increase the cost of these devices.
Until a biometric device such as a X-Jack style thumbprint scanner is ubiquitous, the use of biometrics to ensure identity at the corporate client or consumer level will remain rare.
Posted by Paul Venezia on May 6, 2003 11:46 PM
April 09, 2003 | Comments: (0)
Given any suitably complex structure, when does the application of a logical and orderly layout collapse in on itself when met with the realities of every day use? Can an emphasis on logical address or namespace layouts become a hindrance rather than a benefit?
A specific example might be the DNS structure of an internal organization. Supposing that Hossenfeffer Foods has three locations, 1,200 users, and 40 servers. It would be quite simple to place the whole internal organization under the domain hossenfeffer.com, with hosts identified by their hostname or static DNS entries. There is a desire for DNS names to reflect physical location, however, so subdomains are created.
| hossenfeffer.com |
|---|
| plant.hossenfeffer.com |
| admin.hossenfeffer.com |
| warehouse.hossenfeffer.com |
Then, layer three switching is introduced in all buildings, and the DNS structure is updated to reflect the VLANs
| hossenfeffer.com |
|---|
| acct.plant.hossenfeffer.com |
| ship.admin.hossenfeffer.com |
| dp.warehouse.hossenfeffer.com |
The whole purpose of DNS is to provide a facility to match names to numbers, since humans have an easier time matching a function to a name, rather than a number. www.amazon.com is easier to remember than 207.171.183.16. DNS also exists to facilitate easier back-end changes in server and network resources. If Amazon changes the IP range for their webservers, they need not tell anyone besides their DNS server, and business will continue as usual. Ditto for the utilization of DNS for the purpose of round-robin load balancing. But for the purpose of hossenfeffer.com, are the extra layers necessary?
Take troubleshooting, for example. `ping host234.acct.admin.hossenfeffer.com` is 41 characters. `ping 172.18.32.234` is 19. Where's the benefit in that? Internal DNS is useful for quick digital-to-mental maps; the desire is to ping a host to test for connectivity, and that host should exist in the "acct" VLAN in the "admin" building. Typing 41 characters to achieve this isn't productive.
What if the IP structure matches the physical location, so 172.18.32.234 reflects a physical location in the second octet (172.18.0.0/16=admin) and the VLAN is the third octet (32=acct)? Which is easier to work with on a daily basis? Perhaps both. We're working without rules; we can do as we please, and should make our best guess as to what the future may bring.
The logic and cleanliness of any namespace architecture is wholly dependent on the maintenance of that architecture. Once the scheme is altered, it immediately loses viability and integrity. For instance, say Hossenfeffer completes an acquisition of another company; the desire is to combine the networks as quickly as possible. The DNS structure of the acquired company is well laid out, but in no way matches the layout currently in place. Time doesn't allow for a wholesale change in DNS structure, considering the ramifications of such a change include the potential for serious problems with existing application architectures. It's decided that the DNS structure shall remain in place, with the existing domain name until management decides it's time to remove all references to the old companies' name. If a sub-domain structure didn't exist, it would be simpler to make the migration, but alas, we must rebuild from scratch.
DNS is a simple example. The 800lb gorilla is IP addressing at the network level, LDAP structure at the directory level, and perhaps email structure at the application level. So, what's the solution?
The answer is fairly simple, if not as satisfying as we wish; we can't achieve perfection, but we must continue to head in that general direction, holding the line as best we can while buffeted by political and economical winds. Make the best decisions you can when in the design phase, with a keen eye on reality. You can't predict the future, but that's no reason to let the present suffer.
Posted by Paul Venezia on April 9, 2003 10:31 PM
April 06, 2003 | Comments: (0)
RedHat Linux 7.3 was released in May of 2002. I took my RHCE test a few weeks after, and the test was already updated to 7.3. I passed, and was given RHCE ID 807302814505848.
According to RedHat, the RHCE certification is good for two full releases following the tested release. This means that my RHCE is considered current from RH 7 until RH 9. Five months after my test, RedHat releases RedHat 8.0. Five months following that, RedHat releases RedHat 9. The RHCE test is an 8-hour lab test, costing $850. Less than one year following the test, my RHCE certification is now expired? That certification should have lasted at least two years.
RedHat responds:
Dear Paul Venezia:Yesterday, Red Hat announced the early availability of ISOs via RHN for Red Hat Linux 9, the next release. The official announcement of Red Hat Linux 9 is forthcoming. News travels quickly, however, and many RHCEs and RHCTs have learned that the next version is 9, not 8.1. A number have expressed concerns about the effect this will have on their certification.
Our policy has been that a certificate is considered current for two major releases following the major release under which it was earned. Consequently, certificate holders are concerned that the period for which their certificates remain current has been shortened.
In order to accomodate the release of Red Hat Linux 9, the policy described in the RHCE FAQ at https://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/rhce_faq.html
will be changed to the text below.
Regards and best wishes,
Red Hat Certification CentralPosted by Paul Venezia on April 6, 2003 07:37 PM
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